I suspect he was being hard on the organisation, as in he was providing value but just not the kind of value that he wanted to be adding.

It's valuable for middle/upper management to have someone 'technical' in meetings. Often as a sounding board/is this kind of thing possible/how should we do X/can you explain how Y works/explain it to me like I'm 5. You're providing what feels like 'general knowledge', but is actually knowledge/perspective gained over a number of years working on/in technology.

And depending on the industry, you might also be wheeled between projects and end up having the same conversations again and again just with different people.

From a personal perspective it feels like you're not learning anything (and you probably aren't), and it's a waste of your time. Rather than explaining to people the difference between message queues and databases you'd rather be building systems and solving 'hard' problems (either problems that are hard, or not involving 'soft skills' :-)).

I really don't know. This is something that confuses me about the finance industry in general. Perhaps it's the percentage fee structure on large deals that ends up routing a lot of capital towards finance firms. They spend it frivolously on offices and people.

You know what hppens when you have been driving at 70mph - 30mph seems incredibly slow.

So it is with money and finance.